Exit Kingdom

her feet until she finds what she’s looking for. It’s a big rock, bigger than a football. It takes her half an
hour to dig around it with a stick and extractit from the earth. Nature doesn’t like to be tinkered with.
    Then she carries the rock back down to the beach where the man is lying mostly still.
    When he sees her, he comes to life again and begins squirming and shuddering and guggling his throat.
    Anyway, she says to him, you’re the first one that got here. That counts, I guess. It makes you like Christopher Columbus or something.But this tide and all – you wanna bet
there’s more of you coming? You wanna bet there’s all your slug friends on their way? That’s a pretty safe bet, I’d say.
    She nods and looks out over the shoal again.
    Okay then, she says, lifting the rock up over her head and bringing it down on his face with a thick wet crunch.
    The arms are still moving, but she knows that happens for a whileafterwards sometimes. She lifts the rock again and brings it down on the head twice more just to make sure.
    Then she leaves the rock where it is, like a headstone, and goes down to her fishing net and finds a mediumsized fish in it and takes the fish back up to the lighthouse where she cooks it over a
fire and eats it with salt and pepper.
    Then she climbs the steps to the top of thetower and goes out on the catwalk and looks far off towards the mainland.
    She kneels down and puts her chin against the cold metal railing and says:
    I reckon it’s time to move along again.

Q and A with Alden Bell
    Exit Kingdom
is a prequel to your last book,
The Reapers Are The Angels
. How did you come up with the idea for
The Reapers Are The Angels
? What was your
inspiration?
    Reapers
came about because of my lifelong love of zombie movies. But many post-apocalyptic stories are too nostalgic for my taste. They are origin stories that concern
themselves with howthe world came to this sorry state – focusing on characters who are driven by grief and nostalgia over the lives they have lost. Instead, I’ve always been fascinated
by what post-apocalyptia would look like once it has been around long enough to become
normalized
(like, perhaps,
Road Warrior
or
The Book of Eli
or the video game series
Fallout
). So I wanted my main character to have grown upin this new world – to have no memories whatsoever of the pre-apocalypse. I wanted her to be
comfortable
in all the
situations we would find so devastating and horrific. She sees beauty where we wouldn’t even think to look. I like that tension between beauty and horror – so, in
Reapers
, it was
my idea to exploit it as much as possible.
    Had you always planned to write a prequel to
The Reapers Are The Angels ?
    No.
Reapers
was meant to be a stand-alone book. But, after I had spent some time away from it, I discovered I had a little more to say about that world. Also, I was
intrigued by the idea of approaching the same landscape from a different perspective – taking a secondary character from
Reapers
and turning him into the primary character of
Exit
Kingdom
. IfI were to write a third book, I think I would do the same – maybe telling a story from the Vestal’s perspective.
    Do you miss Temple, the protagonist from
The Reapers Are The Angels
?
    Definitely. But I don’t believe in returning to a character or place or story just because I liked it a lot the first time around. I would imagine it’s difficult for
writers to do a book series withoutit becoming a dog and pony show, without falling back on old tricks. I would be afraid of attenuating Temple. Sometimes the best way to show respect for a
character is to leave her alone.
    Your characters have a very distinct style of speaking. Why was language important in
Reapers
and
Exit Kingdom
?
    Both books reflect a great deal on the inspiration of southern gothic writerslike William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Tom Franklin and Daniel Woodrell – all of whom
celebrate the epic potential of language in their writing. My characters speak in a rather hyperbolic way; they use language that’s almost too big for their frames, biblical in tone,
oratorical in performance – even, let’s admit it, unrealistic (though realism has never really been my aim). Stories are powerfulnot just because of the characters they contain or the
plots they outline but also because of the language used to convey them. In Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
, the protagonist Marlow tells a story that engrosses